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Coalition Urges Congress to Block All Funding for ICE 'Surveillance Panopticon'
"Milquetoast calls for better identification, bodycams, and training fall far short of what is required of you to meet this moment."
Jan 20, 2026
A broad coalition of organizations is calling on the US Congress to block funding for the mass surveillance programs being used by federal immigration enforcement officials.
In a letter sent to members of Congress, the groups decry US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for "leveraging a multi-billion dollar budget to terrorize our communities and build a surveillance panopticon" with no accountability from elected officials.
The letter then singles out several mass surveillance projects being carried out under the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that it says are worthy of defunding, including "building databases of biometrics, sensitive personal data, and daily movements of not only immigrants, but everybody in the US"; "purchasing technology to surveil all the phones in a neighborhood without a warrant"; and "recklessly relying on facial recognition technology that is banned in some states, and misusing that data to intimidate protesters and witnesses."
The groups call on Congress to completely defund ICE or, if that is not politically feasible, to "severely restrict what ICE can spend money on, including a complete moratorium on the purchase and use of surveillance tech" such as facial recognition and license plate readers.
"We urge you to do everything within your power in order to block ICE’s reign of terror in our communities and halt the build out of surveillance tech infrastructure that will make it impossible for everyday people to do anything at all without Big Brother watching," the groups conclude. "Milquetoast calls for better identification, bodycams, and training fall far short of what is required of you to meet this moment."
Signatories of the letter include the Yale Privacy Lab, digital rights organization Fight for the Future, and several local chapters of progressive political organizing group Indivisible.
ICE's big investments in surveillance technology were documented in an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report published earlier this month, which found ICE "is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history."
The EFF report highlighted the role played by Cellebrite, a company that helps ICE unlock protesters' phones and "take a complete image of all the data on the phone, including apps, location history, photos, notes, call records, text messages, and even Signal and WhatsApp messages."
This is particularly important, the report noted, because the number of phones searched by ICE and other agencies has been steadily increasing, hitting a record high last year.
ICE also has a contract with Paragon, the company behind the spyware Graphite that "is able to harvest messages from multiple different encrypted chat apps such as Signal and WhatsApp without the user ever knowing."
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'New Year's Eve Massacre': Trump Administration Makes Deep Cuts at FEMA as Climate Crisis Accelerates
A former FEMA official said that the agency "can't do disaster response and recovery without" the employees being terminated by the Trump administration.
Jan 02, 2026
The Trump administration this week made abrupt cuts to the top federal disaster response agency, even as US communities face increased threats from natural disasters caused by the global climate crisis.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported on Wednesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) "has begun issuing termination notices" to staff at the agency's Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) that are effective as of January 2.
A FEMA staffer who spoke with Kabas described the terminations as "The New Year's Eve Massacre," and explained that "the driving force behind all CORE employees is supporting and enacting the mission of preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters."
A Thursday report from CNN added some additional details to Kabas' reporting, including that the decision to issue the layoffs was made by Acting Administrator Karen Evans, who was appointed to the role after former Acting Administrator David Richardson resigned in November.
One former FEMA official bluntly told CNN that the agency "can't do disaster response and recovery without CORE employees" that are being laid off by the administration.
The former FEMA official added that regional agency offices throughout the US "are almost entirely CORE staff, so the first FEMA people who are usually onsite won’t be there," which will mean that "states are on their own" when it comes to disaster response.
CNN also reported that there is anxiety among remaining FEMA staffers that these cuts could just be the start "of a larger effort" by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem "to shrink FEMA, potentially axing thousands of workers in the coming months who deploy during hurricanes, wildfires and other national emergencies."
President Donald Trump has been targeting FEMA for potential termination for nearly a year now, and he said shortly after being inaugurated last January that a goal in his second term would be "fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA," while emphasizing that individual states should bear the cost of responding to natural disasters.
“I think, frankly, FEMA’s not good,” the president said. “I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go, and whether it’s a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time calling FEMA.”
The Trump administration's deep cuts to FEMA come as the intensity of natural disasters is only projected to increase thanks to climate change.
According to a report published on Tuesday by the Yale School of the Environment, 2025 was the second hottest on record and was only surpassed by the previous year.
"The last three years have been, by a wide margin, the hottest ever recorded," stressed the report. "Each of the last three years has measured more than 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial times, putting the world at least temporarily in breach of an international goal to limit warming below that level."
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Citing New Study, Sanders Calls Trump-GOP Budget Bill a 'Death Sentence' for 51,000 People Yearly
"In the wealthiest country in the world, we should be guaranteeing healthcare to all as a human right, not taking healthcare away from millions of seniors and working families to pay for tax breaks for billionaires."
Jun 03, 2025
An analysis released Tuesday by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale estimates that more than 51,000 additional people across the United States would die unnecessarily each year if the Republican Party's budget reconciliation package becomes law.
The analysis, requested by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), focuses specifically on the Trump-GOP bill's attacks on healthcare, examining the deadly consequences of throwing millions of people off Medicaid and barring implementation of a Biden-era rule requiring nursing homes that receive federal funding to meet minimum staffing levels.
The researchers project:
- 11,300 deaths from the loss of Medicaid or Affordable Care Act Marketplace coverage due to 7.7 million people losing coverage;
- 18,200 deaths due to the loss of Medicaid coverage among 1.38 million low-income Medicare beneficiaries, causing loss of access to low-income prescription drug subsidies; and
- 13,000 deaths among Medicaid enrollees in nursing homes due to the rollback of CMS's 2024 nursing home minimum staffing rule.
The analysis also finds that the GOP bill's failure to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits that are set to lapse at the end of the year would cause an additional 8,811 deaths per year, bringing the total to more than 51,300.
"Let's be clear. The Republican reconciliation bill, which makes massive cuts to Medicaid in order to pay for huge tax breaks for billionaires, is not just bad public policy. It is not just immoral. It is a death sentence for struggling Americans," Sanders said in response to the findings. "That's not Bernie Sanders talking. That is precisely what experts at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania have found."
"In other words, when you throw 13.7 million Americans off the healthcare they have as the CBO has estimated, when you increase the cost of prescription drugs for low-income seniors, and when you make nursing homes throughout America less safe, not only will some of the most vulnerable people throughout our country suffer, but tens of thousands will die," Sanders added. "We cannot allow that to happen."
Warren Gunnels, Sanders' staff director, contrasted the projected consequences of the Trump-GOP healthcare agenda with those of Medicare for All, which previous research suggests would prevent 68,000 needless deaths per year while saving the country hundreds of billions of dollars annually on healthcare costs.
Sanders argued Tuesday that "in the wealthiest country in the world, we should be guaranteeing healthcare to all as a human right, not taking healthcare away from millions of seniors and working families to pay for tax breaks for billionaires."
"As the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, I will be doing everything that I can to see that this disastrous bill is defeated," said Sanders.
The new research was published as the Senate weighs the House-passed GOP reconciliation package, which would slash Medicaid by more than $700 billion over the next decade and enact deep cuts to federal nutrition assistance and other programs—all to help fund massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
Late last week, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) sparked outrage with a sarcastic response to a constituent's warning that "people will die" from the GOP's proposed Medicaid cuts—a fear borne out by the new analysis from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
Over the weekend, Ernst followed up her remark with a non-apology that, to critics, underscored the cruelty of the Trump-GOP agenda.
"If Republicans get their way, families will be forced to choose between groceries or seeing a doctor, sick children will be turned away from care, and lives will be lost—and Ernst and Republicans don't seem to care," said Brad Woodhouse, president of the advocacy group Protect Our Care. "That's because the Republican healthcare agenda isn't about protecting families or lowering costs, it's about slashing millions' healthcare in order to bankroll massive tax breaks for the wealthiest individuals and companies."
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